


Fish Tank

by Veelez (Hyela)



Category: Oz (TV), Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Prison, Bittersweet, F/F, F/M, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, characters might be a little OOC due to the circumstances, not saying that Stiles or Derek dies but others do, rather dark
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-02-11
Updated: 2013-02-11
Packaged: 2017-11-29 00:18:53
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,230
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/680520
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Hyela/pseuds/Veelez
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>This is a collection of stories taking place in a penitentiary (most specifically, OZ). Each chapter is also based off a fairy tale or a fable. Multiple pairings and story lines. Not really a central plot.</p><p>Introduction- In which OZ is presented as the land of the wicked, wherein only a few Dorothy ever go home.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Fish Tank

**Author's Note:**

> -Yes, other chapters will be longer.
> 
> –All of the Titles come from the show OZ, either from quotes or titles of episodes.
> 
> -OZ is quoted here and there in the stories too.
> 
> –All of the short stories are also based of a fairy tale or a fable, in some way.
> 
> –Every story should be assumed to be rated M or higher, even if they’re actually not, because 1) This is a OZ AU, and 2) I’m SHIT at rating stuff.
> 
> –There will be death. There will be rape, or at least talks about rape. There will be violence, trickeries, immoral acts and weird ways of thinking. If you can’t handle a dark gray view of the world, this might not be for you. Warnings will be put at the beginning of each chapter.
> 
> –I have never been to prison, and I don’t know anyone who did time. Actually I do, but they never told me about it. It might show. Like, a lot.
> 
> –All of the stories take place in the same universe.

_Through me you pass into the city of woe:_   
_Through me you pass into eternal pain:_   
_Through me among the people lost for aye._

_Justice the founder of my fabric mov'd:_   
_To rear me was the task of power divine,_   
_Supremest wisdom, and primeval love._

_Before me things create were none, save things_   
_Eternal, and eternal I endure._   
_All hope abandon ye who enter here._

_Such characters in colour dim I mark'd_  
 _Over a portal's lofty arch inscrib'd:_  
 _Whereat I thus: Master, these words import._  
~Dante Alighieri, La Divine Comédie

 

OZ.

That’s the name on the street for the Oswald Maximum Security Penitentiary.

OZ stands for Ozymandias, the fallen king of kings trapped under his prison of sand, condemned to be buried alive, destined to be forsaken and forgotten.

OZ stands for the ounces of humanity leaving each one of its inmates, day by day, until nothing is left inside them, but the rotten emotions that’ll cause their own destruction in the end.

OZ is for Osiris, the Egyptian God of the afterlife, the underworld and the dead; because who says you need to cease to breathe to be lifeless?

OZ is the great Wizard of OZ, not so great anymore, who decided not to offer any red shoes to any Dorothy imprisoned in his land; in other words, your chances of going home are next to inexistent and those with all of the power within their hands, those who look upon you, they don’t care. You are irrelevant as the hero of your own story.

Alan Deaton, he fancies himself a Wizard. He wants to change what society deems irredeemable trash into civilized, law-abiding citizens. He believes that the prisoners are folks who lost their way and lashed out in an attempt to protect themselves from a world that rejected them. He believes in rehabilitation and redemption rather than punishment; in talking things through rather than beating you through a wall. To try and prove his point, Deaton created an experimental unit inside OZ which some people call Emerald City. From there, you can see everything and everyone. All of the cells (or cages) are made out of reinforced glass. You look up left, you can see Jackson Whittemore taking a leak while talking to his boxing cellmate Danny Mahealani. You look down right, you will catch sight of Scott McCall punching his wall out of anger and shame for the umpteenth time this day. If you look in the cell above his, you’ll cross gazes with Gerard Argent, keeping an eye on the place from his nest, like a vulture. A few metres away, there is Deucalion Vassalo, nicknamed the Alpha, doing the same, his eyes resting for a moment on his associates playing cards at one of the tables on the first floor. If you are new in Emerald City, you would be wise to notice that you cannot escape their vigilant eyes, nor could you escape their multiple ears. Because there are rules in Emerald City, more than in any other block cells in OZ: you have to follow a routine, you are constantly under guard, you don’t fight, you don’t fuck, you don’t piss if they don’t want you to. But one must be a fool to forget that the paved brick road leading to Emerald City is not yellow, but blood-red. No matter how much surveillance there is, at night, the predators still lurk and plot, ready to go out and stealthily slash your throat in the morning. Or worse. There is always a flaw somewhere, all you gotta do is wait and think for it to reveal itself. So if you are not watching your back, dozens of others might be doing it, rapaciously so. Alan Deaton might be believing, but he is not a caged animal. He lives in a whole other world among vastly different types of people. When things get a bit... shaky, he has a home to go back to.

In order to help him keeping the inmates on a short leash, whether successfully or not, Deaton borrowed from OZ a handful of flying monkeys, or guardians, some of which actually watch the prisoners from the tower situated in the middle of Emerald City. If your own kind, the violent, murderous teapots wasn’t enough to tame you, here’s a whole new category of predators, the ones who barely need an excuse to hit you on the back of the neck with a truncheon. Of course, there are many types of flying monkeys. There are the ones who are strictly there to do their job, like Allison Argent and her father Chris, believing that what they do is just and lawful. There are those who are there because they failed at some point to prove someone in the hierarchy that they had sufficient competences to do better with their lives, such as Bobby Finstock and Adrian Harris: those like to hit to forget about this peculiar failure. There is also the corrupted kind, evidently. Those who are there because they were told to get there, strategically. That would be the case of Kali Agnihotri, Deucalion’s friend, although no one is supposed to acknowledge that. Finally, there’s the bored kind. Someone like one Kate Silver, who is there for the sole reason that she can and want to be there, because being in a position of power excites her, because she had nothing better to do, because she felt like manhandling men one fateful morning. You do not want to end up on the black list of a flying monkey.

People rarely go out of OZ unless they survive long enough and gently enough to get parole, but here’s the thing: even if you get it, it is not the you who entered OZ for the first time that comes out. It is a whole new creature, a deformed mess, twisted and damaged, that comes out. And a lot of these creatures will end up back inside, because they got used to live there, as simple as that. See, there is a radical difference between leaving your home for an extended holiday and coming back a little disoriented, and actually having to move out by force for years before being spat out of prison. It’s like being born in a country, being raised in another, and having to go back to your natal town again after years of being torn from it, bit by bit. You don’t belong anymore. You don’t belong to anywhere at all.

The newcomers get a sense from that when the doors close behind them. As they sit on metallic benches and wait anxiously for a guard to read them the rules of the place, as they are roughly given their clothes and bed sheets, they know that they won’t come out of this place unscathed. As they lock gazes with their assigned guide, an habitué from the place, and are forced to lower theirs under the intensity, they get that there is a risk that they won’t come out of OZ alive.

OZ is a gravestone in the middle of nowhere, where your name is not even engraved. All you are is a scratch on cold cement.

  
OZ is where you live. OZ is where most of you will die. What you were? Don’t matter. What you are? Don’t matter. What you will become?  
Don’t matter.

**Author's Note:**

> Next on: Stiles's story and entrance in OZ.


End file.
